such statements might be blunders and not falsehoods—so
convinced was she that her husband’s mind would
not act at all times as do the minds of other men.
But having such a conviction she was driven to believe
also that almost anything might be possible.
Soames may have been right, or he might have dropped,
not the book, but the cheque. She had no difficulty
in presuming Soames to be wrong in any detail, if
by so supposing she could make the exculpation of
her husband easier to herself. If villainy on
the part of Soames was needful to her theory, Soames
would become to her a villain at once—of
the blackest die. Might it not be possible that
the cheque having thus fallen into her husband’s
hands, he had come, after a while, to think that it
had been sent to him by his friend, the dean?
And if it were so, would it be possible to make others
so believe? That there was some mistake which
would be easily explained were her husband’s
mind lucid at all points, but which she could not
explain because of the darkness of his mind, she was
thoroughly convinced. But were she herself to
put forward such a defence on her husband’s
part, she would in doing so be driven to say that
he was a lunatic—that he was incapable of
managing the affairs of himself or his family.
It seemed to her that she would be compelled to have
him proved to be either a thief or a madman. And
yet she knew that he was neither. That he was
not a thief was as clear to her as the sun at noonday.
Could she have lain on this man’s bosom for
twenty years, and not yet have learned the secrets
of the heart beneath? The whole mind of the man
was, as she told herself, within her grasp. He
might have taken the twenty pounds; he might have taken
it and spent it, though it was not his own; but yet
he was no thief. Nor was he a madman. No
man more sane in preaching the gospel of his Lord,
in making intelligible to the ignorant the promises
of his Saviour, ever got into a parish pulpit, or
taught in a parish school. The intellect of the
man was as clear as running water in all things not
appertaining to his daily life, and its difficulties.
He could be logical with a vengeance—so
logical as to cause infinite trouble to his wife, who,
with all her good sense, was not logical. And
he had Greek at his fingers’ ends—as
his daughter very well knew. And even to this
day he would sometimes recite to them English poetry,
lines after lines, stanzas upon stanzas, in a sweet
low melancholy voice, on long winter evenings when
occasionally the burden of his troubles would be lighter
to him than was usual. Books in Latin and in French
he read with as much ease as in English, and took
delight in such as came to him, when he would condescend
to accept such loans from the deanery. And there
was at times a lightness of heart about the man.
In the course of the last winter he had translated
into Greek irregular verse the very noble ballad of
Lord Bateman, maintaining the rhythm and the rhyme,